The wacky misadventures of the SF->Google/south-bay bike commuter gang

Friday, April 3, 2009

4/3 640 bayway rrr

as the stoker, i feel it is my duty to write the ride report heavily
affected by stokerness, so here it goes:

a fine group of ~18 hot cyclists joined at ritual in the somewhat wee
hours of the morning, and the benefits of tandem cycling already
started showing as scott shared his coffee with me, and in return got
to eat half of my banana bread. we headed out and i was trackstanding
gloriously every time we came to a stop. i felt like i had mad skillz
although maybe i got a tiny bit of help from my captain's foot
touching the ground.

going up cortland wasn't quite as painful as it usually is. win! an
unexpected side effect was that the tandem was much more comfortable
than my own bike so going down cortland or any other piece of crappy
paving wasn't as painful as it usually is either.
tunnel rd went by pretty fast, and the wind was certainly in our favor
this morning. i was trying to see where we were going and make sure we
weren't running into other people or anything, which of course was
pretty useless as i could do nothing about it. it took a bit of
getting used to but hey, if the stoker freaks out about not seeing
where you're going, you're still not going to be able to do anything
about it so you can't really mess up. so pretty soon i relaxed since
scott probably only crashes when he's riding his own bike.
as i'm one of them scandinavian commies all this sharing appeals to
me, and we only had one bottle cage anyway, so we synchronized our
water drinking as well as our cadence.

now what does one do on a tandem by the cyclocross section? while on
the dirt i suggested walking up but scott said "nah" and up we went, i
suggested we should at least walk down but he said "nah, these are
mean brakes" and down we went (in a good way, not the falling over
kind of way). it was surprisingly easy although of course all i had to
do was to sit on my butt and pedal.

xton took the opportunity to do some wheelsucking behind the glorious
tandem but after being taunted did a lead out for us and i think the
max speed we eventually hit on the flats was 31 mph. sliiightly faster
than i'd be able to do on my own.

people attacking was fun since we could always easily catch up and pass. win!
we made it to breakfast at 9:10 or thereabouts, despite a late rollout
and long break at the water stop. average speed of 19.9 mph.

as for scott, he's a great captain. thanks! he gets 5 stars.

great bike handling, i felt safe the whole way

called out bumps in the road to save my ass (literally)

rides with a good cadence. of course this is somewhat subjective but
he did tell me to let him know if i wanted to change it, but it was
great as it was.

let me trackstand at all the stops

provided a nice view

now i'm gonna go to charlie's and tell everyone how awesome sf2g is
and help scott recruit more women for the tandem. i bet the tandem is
a great way of getting more women into sf2g.